Multiplayer games are fun, but it is the competitive nature of such games that makes it even more fun and even addictive for some players. This is why games like Counter-Strike have such a huge following and why it is one of the games often played during eSports competitions, an area that Blizzard would no doubt love to explore with Overwatch.Unfortunately it looks like competitive aspect of the game won’t be available at launch. According to a recent post on the Overwatch forums by the game’s direction Jeff Kaplan, it seems that Blizzard will be holding back on the Competitive Play feature of the game ahead of its launch while the company works out the kinks and tweaks it to make it better.
According to Kaplan, “We worked extremely hard to get Competitive Play in the game for Closed Beta. We’ve been reading feedback from the community and taking it all to heart. As a result, we’ve temporarily disabled Competitive Play for Open Beta so that we can rework the system and make it better. Our plan is to bring back a newly re-designed version of Competitive Play sometime after Overwatch launches.”
No word on when exactly Competitive Play will be reintroduced, but given how long it took Blizzard to introduce certain features in games like Diablo 3 like PvP (which was eventually released as a duelling feature), we’re certainly hoping history won’t repeat itself. In the meantime Overwatch has been pegged for a release on the 24th of May, 2016.